Full Reuse Maintenance Process for Reducing Software Degradatio

It is known that during maintenance activities the system quality tends to degrade. This work presents an investigation on field carried out on two industrial projects with the aim of comparing the efficacy of the “full reuse” compared to the “iterative enhancement” maintenance process. The results of the work confirm the greater efficacy of the first process in slowing down the degradation of software quality. Furthermore, through the analysis of both process and product metrics, we have pointed out that monitoring maintenance performances is a poor indicator of system quality degradation. In fact, when the reduction of maintenance performance becomes important, the quality has degraded considerably and to a point that ordinary maintenance may no longer be taken into account.